Today, millions of children world-wide are described as “latchkey” kids, a term deriving from the observation that when these children arrive at home, either from school or other endeavors, they will often do so to an empty house, and therefore, must carry a latchkey with them. In most cases, parents of these children will be interested and relieved to know their children arrived home safely. Unfortunately, due to other obligations, such as work, those parents who cannot be at home to greet their children also often are not even able to learn when their children do arrive home, which can lead to a great deal of anxiety.
As a result, parents and other caregivers are turning to advancing technologies to alleviate this dilemma. For example, global positioning satellite (GPS) employs an array of satellites and other space-based components for navigation and other location-based services relying upon concepts of trilateration to determine location. Accordingly, various services are currently available to track the location of suitable devices (and, by proxy, the associated user) at a particular time or over time, which parents, caregivers, or other interested parties can employ to, e.g., be apprised of the whereabouts of children.
Unfortunately, GPS-based systems also introduce a variety of undesirable issues. First, special-purpose equipment must be employed, which incurs an added expense, both due to the equipment itself and the (often recurring) GPS service charges, which can be quite substantial over time. Second, children or other suitable parties must be encouraged to neither forget nor refuse to carry the GPS-based tracking device. By integrating GPS equipment into cell phones or other wireless devices that children are often quite willing to keep with them at all times, the second issue can be largely mitigated, yet the first one remains: added expense. Moreover, this issue is often greater than need be, as children or other parties who require suitable types of care, tend to be more likely to lose, damage, or have stolen their mobile devices.
In addition, there are some market participants who believe GPS-based tracking is far too invasive and contrary to many legitimate privacy concerns of the parents, since such data can be potentially utilized in ways not authorized by the parents and in a manner that can be predictably damaging to both parents and children alike. Accordingly, what is needed is a way to give parents or other authorized parties peace of mind, without relying upon GPS-based systems that can be prohibitively expensive and/or undesirable in terms of privacy concerns.